Quaint Lore

When I was teaching English in Hawaii, one of my students told me that she saw ghosts almost every day. I asked if there were any ghosts in the room at the time. She examined the classroom for a moment and said there weren’t.

This incited a debate among the class about the existence of ghosts and why some people see them and others don’t. Personally, I’ve never seen a ghost. According to my students, only true believes of apparitions can see them. At the time, I didn’t buy into that theory. Now I think there may be a lot of truth to it.

In psychology, they refer to this as Subjective Validation. We see what we expect to see. In other words, we interpret the world according to our personal belief system.

We all have a bias toward our own beliefs. Once we accept something as a fact, we start filtering information, looking for things that validate our belief and ignoring everything that disproves it. As adults, we’re not looking for new ways to interpret the world. We merely interpret our experiences in ways that validate what we already know, or at least what we think we know. We become selective in what we see and hear to a point that we’re blind to anything of the contrary. Hence, selective validation.

Often, as I sit at my computer, working on a story, I catch glimpses of movement out of the corner of my eye. When I turn, I find nothing there. My personal explanation is that my eyes are fatigued and I’m merely seeing spots. However, I know people who contribute such images to spirits, claiming they are easier to see with our peripheral vision and when we’re not actually looking for them. Thus, our belief, or lack of belief, in ghosts influences how we interpret the experience.

A prime example of this occurs with sleep paralysis. In this state, your body is asleep while your mind is partially awake. Thus, you’re mentally aware for the most part, but are unable to move. It’s often accompanied by vivid hallucinations and an ominous feeling that there’s a presence or entity in the room with you. This is something I’ve experience many times and it can be frightening, especially if you don’t know what’s happening to you. When I was a kid, it used to terrify me. Now that I know what is happening to me, it’s much less frightening but still very unpleasant.

The psychological significance of sleep paralysis isn’t the experience itself, but rather how people interpret the experience. In ancient times, people believed they were being attacked by witches. Others claimed they were being possessed by demons. This used to be my interpretation, especially after seeing the Exorcist. I believed the devil was trying to take possession of my body.

Many experts believe that sleep paralysis accounts for most stories of alien abductions. In today’s space age society, people no longer see witches or demons while in this state between sleep and wakefulness. Instead, the presence in room has become a terrestrial being performing experiments on them.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? What was your interpretation of it? Can you think of other examples of selective validation? And, here’s an interesting thought, are people seeing ghosts because they’ve been indoctrinated to believe in them or am I not seeing ghosts because I’ve been indoctrinated to believe they don’t exist?

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An American Gothic tale of tragedy, hope, and reconciliation

The sleepy town of Winter Haven holds a secret that has been buried for nearly twenty years. At the heart of the controversy is George O’Briens, who, along with his granddaughter, has been outcast by the community. When Mitchell Sanders, a college student from Boston, arrives to help renovate the O’Brien home, he finds himself entrenched in the family’s dirty little secrets, putting him at odds with his new employers and the citizens of Winter Haven.

NC called, totally freaked out. A crow had landed on her windowsill and cawed at her.

She said, “You know what that means, don’t you?"

I said, “Yes. It means there was a crow on your windowsill.”

“No. It means I’m going to die or something really bad is going to happen.”

Laughter on my end of the phone.

“I’m glad you find this funny,” she said.

Now the crow has been hanging around her place, not a good omen for someone who believes in omens.

Crows are smart birds. If you threaten them, they will remember your face and tell all of their crow buddies about you. They memorize the route of garbage trucks so they know when and where to find food. This ability earned them a bad reputation during medieval battles as a murder of crows followed the foot soldiers across the battle field. Perhaps this is why they’re called a “murder of crows,” not a group, not a flock, but a murder.

Crows soon figured out that the marching soldiers would ultimately bring bloodshed. And to a crow that means dinner. So of course they followed the soldiers, who then began to see the presence of crows as a bad omen. They were harbingers, foreshadowing the evil that would soon fall upon them.  Once the battle was over, the crows would swoop in and feast upon the dead, adding to their sinister image.

I guess the alien invasion is old news by now, isn’t it? Yet in all these years, no one has been able to provide substantiated evidence of any extraterrestrial visitation. Sure, we’ve all met people who seem to be from another planet. My friend NC is a prime example. But the authorities reject all of my claims of her being of alien origin.

Nor are they convinced by all of the eyewitness accounts or by the numerous videos on YouTube. I’ve personally watched footage of an alien autopsy dating back to a 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and watch an interview with an alien filmed inside Area 51 in Nevada. But then again, I’ve also watched the videos that debunk these claims.

So now I’m confused. Have the aliens invaded or not? Is it a series of hoaxes fabricated by people wanting publicity? Or perhaps a massive cover up by the government?

Do Aliens Exist?

Before we can discuss the likelihood of aliens visiting Earth, we should establish whether or not they even exist. For a planet to sustain life, it must reside in what scientists call the Goldilocks Zone. In other words, it has to be just the right distance from a star so that it’s not too hot and not too cold. Too hot and water vaporizes. Too cold and water turns to ice. Since life requires liquid water to survive, Earth is the only planet in our solar system capable of sustaining life (unless of course you classify bacteria as life).

But that’s just our solar system. The universe is pretty vast with lots of other planets orbiting their own stars. In our galaxy alone, scientists estimate that there are at least 50 billion planets. Out of those, over 500 million are potentially Goldilocks planets.

Hence, to paraphrase Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, it would be improbable for life not to exist somewhere other than Earth.

Have Aliens Visited Earth?

I think we can safely say that we’re not alone in the universe. But have any of these neighbors stopped by for a visit.

So far, scientists have identified 68 potential Goldilocks planets. The closest one to the Earth is Gliese 581 c. When looking at the vastness of the universe, Gliese 581 c is relatively close, yet it’s still 119 trillion miles (192 trillion km) away. That’s 20.3 light years (a measurement of distance, not time). In other words, it would take light 20.3 years to travel from Earth to Gliese 581 c. Unfortunately, we can’t travel anywhere near the speed of light.

Light travels at 186,282 miles per second (670 million miles per hour). It could circle the Earth 7.5 times in one second. It takes light:

1.3 seconds to reach the moon

8.3 minutes to reach the sun

4.3 years to reach the nearest star

The space shuttle travels about 17,500 - 18,000 miles per hour. The fastest manmade object ever sent into to space was Helios II. It traveled at 157,070 miles per hour, four thousand times slower than the speed of light. Voyager 1 has covered 1/600th of a light year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000th the speed of light.

Though light travels from the Earth to the moon in 1.3 seconds, it takes our space crafts over four days to travel the same distance. With our current technology, it would take us roughly 350,000 years to travel to Gliese 581 c. Even if we could travel at one-tenth of the speed of light, it would still take about 220 years to reach Gliese 581 c.

Granted, there could be alien civilizations that are far more advanced than ours, but can they travel at the speed of light? It seems improbable. How about wormholes? That would certainly cut down on the amount of time it takes to traverse the universe.

There is no observational evidence for wormholes, but in his theory of general relativity, Einstein hypothesizes that they might exist. However, they would be miniscule and too unstable to allow a craft to pass through.